Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Implications

• In Event: Foucault in Education: Generative Dialogues on Power, Knowledge, and Resistance Across Theory, Practice, and Method

Abstract

This presentation illuminates the paradox of referring to “Foucault” or his “theory and method” in the singular. Rather than attempt to unify Foucault's thought, this presentation draws inspiration from Foucault's description of theory as a box of tools that derive their utility precisely to the extent they address the problematizations that scholars intentionally choose to inquire into and by which conceptualizations arise in direct contact with practice. The presentation engages with an ironic “abuse” of Foucault’s thought in which state apparatuses draw on the Panopticon as power diagrams to exert effective control over social spaces. Such “abuse” is symptomatic of a non-productive circulation of Foucault’s objects of inquiry, which has overextended concepts such as Panopticism, especially in the field of education, hence stifling further critical development and potentialities for resistance.

The presentation thus engages with the deployment of Panoptic models, in the policing of Chinese urban and educational spaces. Recently, popular discourse has responded sarcastically to these deployments as a “nì liàn” of Foucault. Nì liàn, a term popularized by Chinese Wuxia novels, suggests an inappropriate, fraudulent, or backwards enactment of a Kungfu theory. I therefore explore the possible feedback loop between Foucauldian frameworks and the Chinese government’s management of schools as a laboratory for strategizing and securitizing political control. The central question guiding the inquiry asks how this relation mirrors a broader theoretical and political impasse of Foucauldian critical theory in Chinese education and the global South.

The discussion first draws an empirical contour of the interlocking events where Foucault’s theory was “used” backwardly to reflect on how state power utilizes epistemological figures and models of power available in Foucauldian framework to strategize low-cost, mobile, and insidious forms of control within schools and, by extension, their urban milieus. Second, I trace key moments from the 1990s when the vogue of Foucault’s theories of subjectification and governmentality waxed and waned within Chinese educational theory. Recent backward uses of Foucault have emerged not because Foucauldian theory became broadly “available” but because Chinese critical theory stopped reinterrogating Foucault in the contexts of newly emerging dynamics of power. Finally, I revisit two key moments in Chinese curriculum theory: Foucauldian theory and American Pragmatism, the former criticized for having ascribed agency only to disciplines and institutions, and the latter for relying on certain moral discourses. These two criticisms coincide to halt actions and absorb alternatives to personal, community resistance and institutional action.

In Wuxia novels, a backward practice of Kungfu can pose a tough challenge for orthodox martial styles because of its fraudulent, non-style, and therefore unexpected attacks. Similarly, state power acts capriciously. Thus, the presentation calls for strategies that employ Foucauldian theory not as an “arrival” but as swift tactics to disrupt local power configurations. This presentation expands our empirical and theoretical knowledge of Foucault’s work and bridges conversations between Chinese and global Foucauldian curriculum theory. Considering this year’s conference theme and the accelerating authoritarian populist threats to the social, political, economic, and educational realms, such a reconsideration of Foucault’s work is crucial.

Author

• Junzi Huang, Peking University